Open Access Week 2014

Harvard is celebrating Open Access Week, an international series of events highlighting open access to research, and promoting open access as the new default for peer-reviewed scholarship and research.

This web page lists announcements already out, and the page will be updated with new announcements as we release them.

October 14

OA Playlist

October 15

DASH Participation in Outernet: Harvard's Open-Access Repository Is Going Where No Repository Has Gone Before

Harvard's open-access repository, DASH (Digital Access to Scholarship at Harvard), is now participating in Outernet, a new start-up broadcasting free content by satellite to every part of the globe. Outernet reaches users who don't have conventional Internet access and users subject to censorship from conventional Internet service providers.

DASH is run by the Harvard Library's Office for Scholarly Communication (OSC), and already provides free online access to peer-reviewed scholarly articles by Harvard faculty. But until now, it only reached users connected to the conventional Internet. When Outernet launched in September, it included 10 articles from DASH. If both sides are happy with the result, then they will scale up to include all eligible DASH content. DASH is the first university open-access repository and first scholarly resource to take part in Outernet.

During the present pilot project, and later if they scale up, Harvard will not pay Outernet and Outernet will not pay Harvard. Outernet's end users will never have to pay to receive this content.

Peter Suber commented, "As director of the OSC, I have no doubt that this project is consistent with our mission to enhance the distribution, visibility, and use of Harvard research. As an author with articles in DASH, I'm delighted to know that my work will start reaching readers who lack access to the uncensored Internet, and readers who lack access to the Internet altogether."

Jonathan Zittrain is an author participating in the pilot and a professor at Harvard Law School, the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, and the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. Asked for his assessment, he replied, "The Internet has been premised on the ability for anyone to communicate with anyone. This pilot project helps make that premise into a promise — modeling scholarship that is made available to anyone inquiring for it, however far away, and whatever barriers might lie in between."

The Copyright First Responder program responds to a need identified by Kyle K. Courtney, a librarian and lawyer serving as the Copyright Advisor to the Harvard Library Office for Scholarly Communication. While at the Harvard Law School Library, Courtney noticed the growing number of copyright questions. Some queries were based on settled points of law and policy, but others arose from recent changes in copyright law and had implications for libraries and their users.

In response, Courtney developed a 16-week copyright law immersion program to help the inaugural cohort of 14 Harvard librarians answer the copyright questions from Harvard's faculty, administrators, students, and fellow librarians.

When the immersion program ended in August, the CFRs' work officially began. Courtney is now working with the CFRs to establish the program at a dozen different Harvard libraries and archives. The short-term goal is to identify each responder as the first point of contact for copyright questions for that community, creating a "hub-and-spoke" model of copyright support at Harvard. Monthly meetings, an active listserv, and a robust wiki help members work together to develop the best solutions to common questions and enable them to exchange suggestions, experiences, and success stories.

Courtney and the CFRs are recording the questions they receive. This will help Harvard document the demand met by the program, fine-tune future versions of the CFR immersion course, and write a guide to help other institutions launch similar programs.

Once the first cohort of CFRs has had time to establish themselves in their communities, Courtney plans to launch a second CFR cohort. For those interested in joining or making use of the program, please contact the Office for Scholarly Communication at osc@harvard.edu.

October 16

Harvard Rolls Out New Tool For Depositing Theses and Dissertations into its Open-Access Repository

The Harvard Library Office for Scholarly Communication is pleased to use the occasion of Open Access Week to celebrate the adoption of Harvard's new electronic thesis and dissertation (ETD) submission system: ETDs @ Harvard. The Harvard Medical School (HMS) was the first Harvard school to launch the system, in January 2014. It deposited 20 doctoral dissertations in DASH, Harvard's open-access repository, and listed them in HOLLIS+, Harvard Library's new catalog. Since the collection of HMS dissertations went live in DASH in July, these works have been downloaded over 400 times.

As Stephen Volante, HMS Honors Program Coordinator notes, "When I took over [this role] in January 2013, successful students earned an academic distinction and bound copies of their theses went to Countway. There was no evidence of interest in theses beyond each student's small professional network. [Our program's] ETDs @ Harvard implementation in 2014 resulted in a collection of 20 theses in DASH that has, in less than three months, generated over 800 previews and 400 downloads. We can now demonstrate to students that by earning Honors, they are not just collecting more recognition. They are making active, substantial contributions to their fields that other physicians and researchers will seek out, study, and value." A second HMS program, Master of Medical Sciences in Global Health Delivery, is currently submitting student work through the tool.

This fall, six more schools will roll out their own instances of ETDs @ Harvard: the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Graduate School of Design, Graduate School of Education, Harvard Business School, Harvard Divinity School, and Harvard School of Public Health. Three more will follow suit shortly thereafter.

Getting to this point required the collaboration of these schools with one another, and with other stakeholders across campus, such as the Office of General Counsel, Office for Scholarly Communication, Office of Technology Development, Student Billing, Registrars, program administrators, librarians, archivists, and students. Thanks to cooperation from every quarter, Harvard now has a University-wide open-source ETD submission system with the efficiency of central support and the flexibility of school-level customization.

Submitting a dissertation now takes a student just 10 minutes. In the process, students supply some metadata about their work, some contact information for themselves, and a copy of the final text. At the same time, they have the opportunity to submit an ORCID (Open Researcher and Contributor ID) and sign Harvard's license agreement, granting the University a non-exclusive license to preserve, reproduce, and display the work.

Most importantly, these dissertations become open access, enlarging the authors' audience and increasing their impact.

Garth McCavana, Dean of Student Affairs for the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (GSAS) notes "GSAS students have been submitting their dissertations electronically since 2011 through a tool developed by ProQuest. We were initially cautious of moving our students to a new system, but the Office of Scholarly Communication has made the transition seamless." He continued that "the new ETDs @ Harvard tool is extremely user-friendly and explains students' options in a very clear manner. We think that ETDs @ Harvard will allow our students to weigh all the benefits of open access and allow them to promote their research widely."

OSC Director Peter Suber welcomed the roll-out of ETDs @ Harvard. "Open access removes the cloak of invisibility from this very useful form of research literature. Opening up this work serves readers working on related topics, and serves authors seeking the widest possible audience. Making open access the default, subject to some exceptions and embargoes, is a modern realization of Harvard's pre-digital policy to make dissertations available to the public, and not to grant degrees for contributions to knowledge that are kept secret."

The OSC is delighted with the success of ETDs @ Harvard, and looks forward to its further spread across Harvard, helping to realize the vision of One Harvard.

Harvard Will Help Researchers Open Up Their Data

Many Harvard researchers are subject to open-data policies from the journals publishing their articles or the agencies funding their research. Many others simply want to open up their data to realize the benefits of transparency, collaboration, data citation, research acceleration, and reproducibility. ODAP is a program to help them.

ODAP will offer advice and instruction on how to deposit data files in Harvard Dataverse. When privacy is an issue, ODAP will offer advice on how to make data files as open as privacy constraints will allow. Since anyone in the world may deposit in Dataverse, ODAP's online assistance should help researchers everywhere. However, when online assistance isn't enough, ODAP staffers and volunteers will offer personal assistance to Harvard faculty, students, fellows, and postdocs. We encourage other institutions to offer personal assistance to their own researchers as well, and can work with them on how to do that.

Dataverse has already proved its utility to researchers. One witness is Alyssa Goodman, Harvard Professor of Astronomy: "Keeping track of digital data has become a critical problem for scientists, thanks to the growing size and diversity of data sets. The Dataverse offers a robust way to store, share, and cite data, because the system is flexible enough to satisfy impatient scientists depositing data, while still providing rich metadata options that allow for sophisticated searching."

Susan O'Connor Gomes, Harvard's Director of Research Development and Strategy, is another: "Increasingly, funders are requiring the inclusion of data management plans in grant proposals. While each funder and discipline may have varying requirements, Dataverse can serve as a valuable tool to meet the requirement for long term data preservation and access. Many Harvard researchers have already taken advantage of Harvard's Dataverse as their data management plan solution."

Sarah Thomas, Vice President for the Harvard Library, put it this way: "Data is one of the most vital resources of the 21st century. Fortunately, with Harvard's Dataverse, data associated with research can be stored and made accessible freely so others around the world can replicate studies and reuse it for new purposes. The Harvard Library will link publications in DASH, Harvard's institutional repository, to data in Dataverse, enriching the pool of open access information."

Peter Suber, director of the Office for Scholarly Communication, said, "Dataverse is powerful, flexible, and well-used. It already contains more than 55,000 data sets. But it could have many more if more researchers knew how to take advantage of its power. ODAP will help Dataverse reach out to users, help Harvard researchers find an open home for their data, and help researchers working on the same topics find data sets open for use and reuse."

The first initiative is for electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs). Harvard now has a full-scale program to manage the submission, preservation, and enhanced access to its electronic theses and dissertations. Harvard ETDs are open access in DASH (Digital Access to Scholarship at Harvard), the open-access repository maintained by OSC. Record copies of the same ETDs are preserved by the Harvard University Archives, the Countway Library at Harvard Medical School, and the Baker Library at the Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration.

Long-term preservation of ETDs is provided by the Digital Repository Service (DRS) which offers a set of professionally managed services to ensure the usability of securely stored digital objects over time. DRS is jointly managed by the Harvard Library Preservation, Conservation, and Digital Imaging division and Library Technology Services (LTS) in HUIT. Tracey Robinson, Managing Director of LTS, noted that "inclusion of ETDs in the DRS will help to ensure that these materials will remain accessible and usable for future scholars even as the tools and processes for managing and accessing digital scholarly information continue to evolve."

When the open-access copies in DASH are redacted for copyright or confidentiality reasons, the non-circulating copies in DRS will remain unredacted. In addition to preserving the unredacted digital editions, now considered the record copies, the Archives will continue to retain preservation copies in print.

Harvard University Archivist Megan Sniffin-Marinoff concludes: "Working with DASH on this effort has completely changed how we approach the continuation of collecting and preserving dissertations at Harvard. The open-access and preservation copies are perfect complements to one another and together they serve authors and readers better than either could do alone."

The second initiative goes beyond ETDs to peer-reviewed scholarly articles and other scholarly content. Now that Harvard has built a channel to preserve DASH content in DRS, starting with ETDs, it plans to preserve the rest of DASH in DRS as well. Today DASH contains nearly 20,000 peer-reviewed scholarly articles. While the first ETDs will begin flowing from DASH to DRS in the winter of 2014, scholarly articles will start flowing in the same direction soon after.

Peter Suber, Director of the Office for Scholarly Communication, commented, "I'm proud that Harvard's open-access repository is one of the first to take advantage of a state-of-the-art digital preservation system. Open-access repositories take more steps toward preservation than most web sites, but not as many as top-end services like DRS. I welcome this chance to combine open access and serious preservation in one collaborative solution."

Emerson Presents: Intellectual Property and Open Access with Kyle CourtneyEmerson College, School of Communication, noon-1pm

Wikipedia Edit-a-thonMonday, October 203-6pmRoom B-30, Lamont Library

Rob Velella, Wikipedian-in-Residence at Houghton Library, will show examples from the more than 1300 images of Houghton collections he has uploaded to Wikimedia Commons and how they've been used to enhance Wikipedia articles. Then we'll discuss how digitized collections from other Harvard libraries might be used as well, and walk new users through the process of contributing to Wikipedia themselves. Bring your own laptop if you have one, but we'll have loaners on hand for those who don't. Feel free to drop in for a bit or stay the entire time. Please RSVP to John Overholt: overholt@fas.harvard.edu

Peter Suber speaks to the University of Central Florida about open access.

October 21

Harvard Library Lifts Restrictions on Digital Reproductions of Works in the Public Domain

The Harvard Library is pleased to announce a new policy on the use of digital reproductions of works in the public domain. When the Library makes such reproductions and makes them openly available online, it will treat the reproductions themselves as objects in the public domain. It will not try to restrict what users can do with them, nor will it grant or deny permission for any use. For more detail, see the policy FAQ.

The policy supports the Harvard Library's mission to advance scholarship and teaching through the creation, application, preservation, and dissemination of knowledge. Unfettered use and reuse of digitized content for research, teaching, learning, and creative activities supports that mission.

Said Peter Suber, director of the Harvard Library Office for Scholarly Communication and director of the Harvard Open Access Project, "We were inspired by pioneering policies to this effect at Cornell University Library and Yale University. We were also fortunate to have the prime mover of the Cornell policy, Peter Hirtle, at Harvard. I'm proud that Harvard is removing obstacles to research and education, and taking this extra step to share the wealth of its extraordinary collections with the world."

Sarah E. Thomas, Vice President for the Harvard Library and the Roy E. Larsen Librarian of Harvard College, expressed strong support for the policy change. "We have already been using the digitization of Harvard's collections as a means of enhancing access for Harvard's students and faculty," she said. "Now we are seeking to share Harvard's unparalleled collections with the rest of the world in ways that will foster new creativity."

The Harvard Library Board adopted the policy late last month. The Library will update its web sites to reflect the new policy during the remainder of the present academic year.

The OSC is also pleased to announce that Harvard's open access repository, Digital Access to Scholarship at Harvard (DASH), has reached an impressive milestone: nearly 20,000 articles in DASH, which include work from almost 2,800 faculty across the disciplines in the eight schools with policies, have been downloaded almost 4 million times globally.

Open access to this wealth of research has had a demonstrable impact on the diverse cross section of DASH users. Scholars and students, researchers and journalists, doctors and nurses, and social workers and parents from the world over have shared stories of how access to Harvard scholarship has touched their lives.

Samples of these user stories are posted across campus this week, and may also be found here.

October 22

The Berkman Center for Internet & Society is pleased to announce that the Center's faculty directors and staff have adopted an open-access policy. With this policy, approved on October 9, 2014, the Berkman Center's faculty directors and staff join the nine School faculties in granting Harvard nonexclusive rights to their future scholarly articles. The policy ensures that the "fruits of [Berkman's] research and scholarship" will be distributed as widely as possible.

Through this landmark unanimous vote, the Berkman Center has become the first research center at Harvard to adopt an open-access policy, and the first to extend the scope of Harvard's open-access policies beyond the faculty.

"Since its inception, the Berkman Center has promoted and supported open access to scholarly works and educational materials, and this unanimous vote continues that tradition" said Urs Gasser Executive Director of the Berkman Center and Professor of the Practice at Harvard Law School. "It furthers our commitment to sharing and disseminating our scholarship as widely as possible. Through the Harvard Open Access Project and our collaboration with the Harvard Library Office for Scholarly Communication, we are excited to be the first research center at Harvard University to adopt an OA policy."

Peter Suber, a Berkman fellow as well as the Director of the Office for Scholarly Communication and Director of the Harvard Open Access Project remarked, "Harvard already has open-access policies for faculty at all its schools. Now for the first time it has an open-access policy at one of its research centers. Now that the Berkman Center has broken the ice, I expect to see many more Harvard research centers follow its lead."

The new policy is consistent with previous practices at Berkman, where directors and staff typically made their scholarly articles, and sometimes books, open access. But now this community will also have a dedicated collection in DASH (Digital Access to Scholarship at Harvard), including persistent URLs, preservation in the Harvard Library, and individualized traffic stats delivered every month. Berkman faculty directors and staff have the benefit of the licensing provision of the policy, which allows them to retain rights to their own works that they might not otherwise have retained. They also have the nonexclusive rights to make all their future scholarly articles open, without the need to negotiate individually with publishers. The Berkman policy follows the model of Harvard's school-level policies including a waiver option to ensure academic freedom.

Harvard's School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) is pleased to announce a pilot project recommending to faculty engaged in a review, promotion, or tenure process to use Harvard's open-access repository DASH (Digital Access to Scholarship at Harvard) as part of their preparations. There are two benefits. First, DASH will make the faculty member's work more widely and easily accessible to potential participants in a review process. Second, it will provide open access to a larger part of the research output of SEAS faculty members.

SEAS is part of the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences, which unanimously adopted an open-access policy in 2008, asking faculty to deposit their new scholarly articles in DASH. SEAS strongly supports this policy and sees this program as one more incentive to help implement the policy. This recommendation does not change the review, promotion, and tenure criteria or standards at SEAS, and preserves faculty freedom to submit scholarly work to the publishers of their choice.

Registration is quick, and once you have an ORCID you can unambiguously identify yourself with your work across disciplines and other identifying systems globally.

In 2013, Harvard became an institutional supporter of ORCID, "an open, non-profit, community-based effort to provide a registry of unique researcher identifiers and a transparent method of linking research activities and outputs to these identifiers."

Because the theme of this year's Open Access Week is "Generation Next," the OSC would like to encourage Harvard graduate students and early professionals to distinguish themselves with this unique identifier.

The 20,000 works in DASH, Harvard's open-access repository, have been downloaded nearly 4 million times from every country on earth. Our addictive interactive map breaks downloads down by country – displaying the true reach of Harvard scholarship made open through DASH.

October 23

An Open-Access Policy for Harvard Medical School

Harvard Medical School adopted an open-access policy on June 18, 2014, by a unanimous vote of the Faculty Council. The new policy covers both "quad"-based and clinical faculty. Now all Harvard schools have open-access policies.

Like the other Harvard policies, the Medical School policy insures that faculty members automatically retain a license to share their research papers freely through DASH (Digital Access to Scholarship at Harvard), the University's open-access repository. Faculty also have the option to waive this license for any article, preserving their freedom to submit new work to the journals of their choice. When faculty write articles covered by the Medical School policy and the policy at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), they need only deposit once to comply with both. There is no new burden on faculty, just new opportunities to use their retained rights and enlarge their audience.

The Office for Scholarly Communication invites the Harvard community to an informal lunchtime "office hours" event. Drop in, grab a slice of pizza, and learn more about open access, electronic dissertation submission, copyright, fair use, and making your work available in DASH, Harvard's open-access repository.

Emerson Presents: Copyright, Licensing, and Open Access with Kyle CourtneyEmerson College, Graduate School of Communication, 6-8pm

October 24

Harvard's 11 Announcements for Open Access Week 2014

Harvard has taken a series of new steps to support open access to research. The best evidence lies in the 11 announcements released by the Office for Scholarly Communication for Open Access Week 2014 (October 20-24). Here's a brief recap of the series.

These new steps required the cooperation of many campus partners, first for the substance of the new policy or practice, and then for the announcement language, all wrapped up in time to meet the OA Week deadline. We are very grateful to our colleagues in the faculty, libraries, and administration for their cooperation and support for open access.

An Open-Access Policy for Harvard Medical School (October 23, 2014)

Harvard Medical School adopted an open-access policy on June 18, 2014, by a unanimous vote of the Faculty Council. The new policy covers both "quad"-based and clinical faculty. As a result, all Harvard schools now have open-access policies. Like the other Harvard policies, the Medical School policy insures that faculty members automatically retain a license to share their research papers freely through DASH (Digital Access to Scholarship at Harvard), the University's open-access repository. Faculty also have the option to waive this license for any article, preserving their freedom to submit new work to the journals of their choice. (Read more.)

Harvard's School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) announced a pilot project recommending to faculty engaged in a review, promotion, or tenure process to use Harvard's open-access repository DASH (Digital Access to Scholarship at Harvard) as part of their preparations. SEAS is part of the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences, which unanimously adopted an open-access policy in 2008, asking faculty to deposit their new scholarly articles in DASH. SEAS strongly supports this policy and sees this program as one more incentive to help implement the policy. (Read more.)

The Berkman Center for Internet & Society announced that the Center's faculty directors and staff have adopted an open-access policy. In a landmark unanimous vote, the Berkman Center became the first research center at Harvard to adopt an open-access policy, and the first to extend the scope of Harvard's open-access policies beyond the faculty. (Read more.)

Harvard Library Lifts Restrictions on Digital Reproductions of Works in the Public Domain (October 21, 2014)

The Harvard Library announced a new policy on the use of digital reproductions of works in the public domain. When the Library makes such reproductions and makes them openly available online, it will treat the reproductions themselves as objects in the public domain and will not try to restrict what users can do with them. For additional detail, see the policy FAQ. (Read more.)

Harvard Rolls Out New Tool For Depositing Theses and Dissertations into its Open-Access Repository (October 16, 2014)

The Office for Scholarly Communication announced that Harvard schools have started adopting ETDs @ Harvard, a new system for depositing electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs) in DASH, Harvard's open-access repository. The adoption began at Harvard Medical School, and will soon be followed by the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Graduate School of Design, Graduate School of Education, Harvard Business School, Harvard Divinity School, and Harvard School of Public Health. Three more will follow soon after. (Read more.)

Harvard's Open-Access Repository Is Going Where No Repository Has Gone Before (October 15, 2014)

Harvard's DASH (Digital Access to Scholarship at Harvard), is the first university open-access repository and the first scholarly resource to participate in Outernet, a new start-up broadcasting free content by satellite to every part of the globe. Outernet reaches users who don't have conventional Internet access and users subject to censorship from conventional Internet service providers. (Read more.)

Harvard Reports Rapid Progress for Its Copyright First Responder Program (October 15, 2014)

The Office for Scholarly Communication created a mailing list to announce news on open access, scholarly communication, and other topics relevant to its work. The list is limited to events, news, and other developments at Harvard, but welcomes subscribers from beyond Harvard. (Read more.)

Wikipedia Edit-a-thonScience Center B091 - 3 pm

Stop by the Science Center and join Harvard Law School's Carli Spina to learn more about Wikipedia and how you can use and contribute to this collaboratively-written, openly-editable encyclopedia. The session will start with an overview of Wikipedia, the organization that administers it, and how you can get involved. It will then move into an interactive training session for those who want to learn how to edit and add to Wikipedia. This session is intended for those of all skill levels; no prior experience with Wikipedia or computer programming is required. Feel free to stop by at any time and stay for as long as you like.

October 27

The Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences is pleased to announce that it will adopt ETDs @ Harvard, maintained by the Office for Scholarly Communication, to submit undergraduate senior theses to DASH (Digital Access to Scholarship at Harvard), Harvard's open-access repository. The new approach simplifies the submissions process, replacing the previous paper-based method. Through DASH, this student work will be available open access by default, and will also be preserved in Harvard Library's DRS digital-preservation repository.

"Moving to online submission for senior theses not only simplifies the process, but also dramatically expands the reach of these research works that deserve to be more widely available, while retaining students' choice in how they distribute their work," according to Fawwaz Habbal, Executive Dean for Education and Research in SEAS. "This update is a win for the students, the school, the university, and the public."

Background

Harvard has been, and continues to be, a leader in the open access movement.

Since the unanimous vote by the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) to implement a school-wide Open Access Policy in February 2008, seven other Harvard schools - the Graduate School of Education, the Graduate School of Design, the Business School, the Law School, the Kennedy School of Government, the Divinity School, and the School of Public Health - have adopted open access policies. The FAS policy was the first of its kind in the United States, and has served as a model for other institutions.

Harvard continues to champion the open distribution of scholarly knowledge both within and outside its gates and is dedicated to sharing its resources in other ways. DASH, Harvard's open-access repository has nearly 20,000 works available to anyone with an internet connection and counts almost 4 million downloads from every country on earth.

Harvard affiliates have developed and distributed the following resources, which provide information on the open access movement, open access policies, and open access journals: